It isn't just about your personal privacy. The way that society protects other people's privacy can affect your personal well-being.
The simplest example is when a group attains political dominance and is able to breach the privacy of anyone who challenges the status quo. If they can cause sufficient embarrassment or publicly humiliate anyone enough to make them unelectable, they can still appear to run open and fully democratic elections without risk of losing their grip on power.
Society as whole will stagnate and suffer under such conditions, and even if you personally have nothing to hide, chances are that you'll end up suffering too. Although you may not realize it since most people tend to accept that life is the way it is, never wondering if a better life could ever have been an option.
They've blocked both webmail and instant messaging, but the reasoning is "document retention." ie, in case there's a lawsuit they want to guarantee they have all our communications archived.
Sounds like they need to ban cell phones and record every phone call too,
Perhaps if publishers were able to provide some sort of incentive to the player to tie into an on-line activation/validation then people would have more incentive to support the publisher.
Indeed, the most obvious incentive is to release the game in "chapters" where each chapter is only released once the previous chapter has achieved sufficient revenue.
Each chapter needs to be sufficiently independent to make it worth playing and paying for - and to make the players eager to play the next chapter.
That's the way normal game development and publishing works anyway, except instead of chapters - they are entire games. If a game earns enough revenue, the developer is then financially capable of producing the next game. The only difference here is to make the feedback loop between paying for a game and getting the next game in the series obvious to the paying (and non-paying) customers.
Anyway, I think a better question than "how can the government waste money on instead of ?" might be "why do I trust the government to be responsible for these monies in the first place?"
In this case, the question ought to be, "Why are tax dollars being spent to subsidize the business of TV broadcasting?" That trumps all of the other examples given so far - from innocent people (and guilty ones?) being raped and murdered, to terrorism, homelessness, etc. None of those examples involve subsidizing a business in what is supposedly a free-market economy.
Of course the reality on the ground is that the US is far from a free-market economy - pension subsidies, hedge-fund bailouts, and a bazillion other subsidies are rampant. But it doesn't hurt (much) to point out the hypocrisy between what the government says and what they do.
The contract is not agreeable to the consumer so they don't accept it or its condition.
But the result of not accepting the contract is that the consumer does not receive the product and the seller does not receive payment.
The default state is that information is freely shareable.
By *not* accepting the contract, the default conditions apply. Otherwise you end up arguing that by not accepting a contract, a contract still applies.
But how does someone come about owning property? Through social contract. It is generally considered good to allow ownership of this somewhat artificial idea. Before the modern times, property was considered to be communal or owned by the king. Never a single ownership. And this was considered bad.
But isnt that the "grey area" that MP3 Patent lawsuits are brought upon? MP3's aren't the data, its the codec. If the actual "bits" as written by the licensed software is part of the logic of the program couldn't someone say that by using a GPL program to make images based off a GPL codec in a GPL format would have to be GPL'd?
Huh?
The MP3 patent lawsuits are based on a claim of software patents for the encoding and decoding of data. Not on the end results of either operation.
Nobody, or at least nobody of any standing, has tried to claim that Fraunhoffer's software patents on MP3 mean that they can assert any sort of ownership or control over files that contain MP3-encoded data.
I see a red sportscar and I want it painted black No colors anymore I want them to turn black The cops, they won't know how fast my car goes I have to turn my head because their radar blows
I see a line of cars and they're all painted black Driving so fast and never looking back I see people turn their heads as I make my getaway Like a hot booth babe, I do her ever day
I look inside myself and see my heart is painted black Damn nano-paint, the beta-test was just a hack Maybe I'll fade away and not have to face the facts It's not easy breathing when your world is covered with nano-black
No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue I could not foresee this thing happening to you If I look hard enough into the setting sun I still can't see anything, the world is done
I saw a red sportscar that I wanted painted black No colors anymore, I want them back I can't see the girls walk by, it's all just grey goo I have to turn my head and pray this darkness goes
I wanna see it painted, painted black Black as night, black as coal I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
Mod this guy up - Cuda and CTM are Nvidia's and ATI's API's for direct access to the GPU, completely bypassing all the DirectX/OpenGL layers that were previously the only way to shoe-horn in computational workloads. The GP is obsolete and does not deserve a 5 at all.
The web is full of sites that kowtow to vendor's marketing departments. These websites are not worth the electricity they run on. Every reporter and ever editor will have inherent biases, but what we don't need (and have waaaay too much of) are stories that are biased by the reporter's desire to stay in the good-graces of the companies they are reporting on.
If the choice is between press-release reporting and real reporting, I'll take real reporting every day.
I guess you are right, there is a distinction, but I still disagree with you that bigots should be allowed to spread racism even if they don't explicitly advocade violence. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point.
You can go ahead and believe that all you want, that's part of freedom of expression, no one is stopping you. But don't pretend that you believe in freedom of expression because what you are advocating is censorship of expression that offends you.
The U.S. is still behaving crazy-stupid, and paying for it. Why attack again? It would be a waste of resources; they are still getting everything from the one attack 5 years ago that they could hope to get from a new one. If we ever get our heads out of our asses, if we ever get people to think longer than "well no attacks it the last 5 years, so USAPATRIOT must work!", THEN maybe they'll see a need to attack us again.
Uh, that sounds like an argument in support of the PATRIOT Act. As long as we keep it, then we will be safe from further terrorist attacks.
Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise Playing music in school, gonna be a big man some day You got music on myspace You big disgrace Kickin your ipod all over the place
We will, we will, sue you We will, we will, sue you
Buddy you're a young man, pirate man Shoutin' in the school gonna take on the MAFIAA some day You got music on myspace You big disgrace Wavin' your napster all over the place
We will, we will, sue you We will, we will, sue you
Buddy you're an old man, poor man Pleadin' with our lawyers gonna make you pay today
You lost your court case You big disgrace The MAFIAA kicked you off of myspace
We will, we will, sue you We will, we will, sue you
Those who can, do. Those who can't, get certificates.
Go to college and get an internship that will give you lots of hands-on experience. If you want to do networks, expect that as an intern you will start out doing the drudge work of pulling cables and filling in punchdown blocks. But you should also expect (and this should guide you in selecting which company to do your internship with) to eventually get to the point where you are configuring and troubleshooting the routers too. Learn to write (and debug) network applications on unix too, try writing your own ftp client or MUCH better some tool that will be useful in your intern job.
Do like that site in Russia does - keep a lossless copy on the backend and then allow the customer to specify the format and bitrate and then do a transcode on the fly. You can make it simple for non-geeks by providing a short list of typical encodings with short descriptions as to what they are good for, and then charge less for the lower-quality versions (or charge more for the higher-quality, just depends on you look at it). You could even pre-encode a couple of common formats if you worry about cpu utilization on the server.
5.1 is nice - you would have to go with AC3 and DTS (preferrably full-bitrate DTS) to have a chance of any wide-spread interest but it is only nice if mixed by someone who knows what they are doing, otherwise it is just a gimmick.
The current DMCA, AFAIK, makes breaking encryption a questionable prospect, at best. Why should this even be protected?...why are we legislating that the use of "weak" encryption is okay?
Because the uses of encryption that the DMCA protects can never be "strong" - DRM is all about giving people the decryption keys to decode the content but trying to trick them through elaborate obfuscation into not realizing they have the keys. That kind of scheme can never be cryptographically secure, so to patch that loophole, the MAFIAA got the DMCA passed which makes it illegal instead of impossible. The MAFIAA are a bunch of lawyers, to them the laws of man are just as good, if not more useful than the laws of math and physics.
The people at Poland Springs and Avian would be pretty shocked to hear that. Fact is, there's plenty of business models that not only compete with free but are built around giving stuff away for free, so that argument just doesn't fly.
You hinted at this in the rest of your post, but I feel the need to say it explicitly. The bottled water companies are NOT competing with free. They aren't selling water, depending on the brand they are selling other, less tangible things - the perception of quality, convenience, fashion. The medium is water, but just as no one would say that newspapers are in the business of selling paper neither are the bottled water companies in the business of selling water.
The entertainment companies have this figured out in many ways - they sell the pop-star image of someone like Brittany Spears (not so much HER anymore, but close enough) and music is just one medium. They just haven't been able to take the final step of giving it away - probably because some music is still about the music and not about being the promotional tool of a larger campaign.
$1M per year is like $650K per year after taxes, and then there are significant expenses that usually come with jobs that pay so well. Even if you think you can live on ramen and catchup, you won't if you want to maintain a job with that pay level.
You are confusing a restriction with a rating under specific conditions. XP (and/or NT) was rated to a specific level (probably C2) in a specific configuration. When the DoD certifies a system, they do it only for a specific configuration.
In this case, the configuration was with the network turned off. But just because that was the way it was rated does not mean each site is going to run it that way. Merely having the rating for one specific configuration is often enough to give a site security admin enough CYA to approve the system for use in a different configuration.
Having seen this stuff happen for a while, it is my opinion that the vast majority of government security work is checking off check-boxes without actually engaging the brain to decide if the intent represented by the check-box is really being followed or not.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't just about your personal privacy. The way that society protects other people's privacy can affect your personal well-being.
The simplest example is when a group attains political dominance and is able to breach the privacy of anyone who challenges the status quo. If they can cause sufficient embarrassment or publicly humiliate anyone enough to make them unelectable, they can still appear to run open and fully democratic elections without risk of losing their grip on power.
Society as whole will stagnate and suffer under such conditions, and even if you personally have nothing to hide, chances are that you'll end up suffering too. Although you may not realize it since most people tend to accept that life is the way it is, never wondering if a better life could ever have been an option.
They've blocked both webmail and instant messaging, but the reasoning is "document retention." ie, in case there's a lawsuit they want to guarantee they have all our communications archived.
Sounds like they need to ban cell phones and record every phone call too,
I'm paraphrasing, but the language says basically 'put into place a system of controls, and document those controls'.
Replace "controls" with "processes" and that sounds like ever ISO certification I've ever seen.
Perhaps if publishers were able to provide some sort of incentive to the player to tie into an on-line activation/validation then people would have more incentive to support the publisher.
Indeed, the most obvious incentive is to release the game in "chapters" where each chapter is only released once the previous chapter has achieved sufficient revenue.
Each chapter needs to be sufficiently independent to make it worth playing and paying for - and to make the players eager to play the next chapter.
That's the way normal game development and publishing works anyway, except instead of chapters - they are entire games. If a game earns enough revenue, the developer is then financially capable of producing the next game. The only difference here is to make the feedback loop between paying for a game and getting the next game in the series obvious to the paying (and non-paying) customers.
In this case, the question ought to be, "Why are tax dollars being spent to subsidize the business of TV broadcasting?" That trumps all of the other examples given so far - from innocent people (and guilty ones?) being raped and murdered, to terrorism, homelessness, etc. None of those examples involve subsidizing a business in what is supposedly a free-market economy.
Of course the reality on the ground is that the US is far from a free-market economy - pension subsidies, hedge-fund bailouts, and a bazillion other subsidies are rampant. But it doesn't hurt (much) to point out the hypocrisy between what the government says and what they do.
The default state is that information is freely shareable.
By *not* accepting the contract, the default conditions apply. Otherwise you end up arguing that by not accepting a contract, a contract still applies.
Why was it bad?
The MP3 patent lawsuits are based on a claim of software patents for the encoding and decoding of data. Not on the end results of either operation.
Nobody, or at least nobody of any standing, has tried to claim that Fraunhoffer's software patents on MP3 mean that they can assert any sort of ownership or control over files that contain MP3-encoded data.
I see a red sportscar and I want it painted black
No colors anymore I want them to turn black
The cops, they won't know how fast my car goes
I have to turn my head because their radar blows
I see a line of cars and they're all painted black
Driving so fast and never looking back
I see people turn their heads as I make my getaway
Like a hot booth babe, I do her ever day
I look inside myself and see my heart is painted black
Damn nano-paint, the beta-test was just a hack
Maybe I'll fade away and not have to face the facts
It's not easy breathing when your world is covered with nano-black
No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you
If I look hard enough into the setting sun
I still can't see anything, the world is done
I saw a red sportscar that I wanted painted black
No colors anymore, I want them back
I can't see the girls walk by, it's all just grey goo
I have to turn my head and pray this darkness goes
I wanna see it painted, painted black
Black as night, black as coal
I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky
I wanna see it painted, painted, painted, painted black
I thought one of the points of Linux was that it was free...
TANSTAFL, it is Free as in freedom and liberty not free as in a free lunch.
That's odd, OpenSSL was just certified to level 2 (FIPS 140-2).
Mod this guy up - Cuda and CTM are Nvidia's and ATI's API's for direct access to the GPU, completely bypassing all the DirectX/OpenGL layers that were previously the only way to shoe-horn in computational workloads. The GP is obsolete and does not deserve a 5 at all.
The web is full of sites that kowtow to vendor's marketing departments. These websites are not worth the electricity they run on. Every reporter and ever editor will have inherent biases, but what we don't need (and have waaaay too much of) are stories that are biased by the reporter's desire to stay in the good-graces of the companies they are reporting on.
If the choice is between press-release reporting and real reporting, I'll take real reporting every day.
I guess you are right, there is a distinction, but I still disagree with you that bigots should be allowed to spread racism even if they don't explicitly advocade violence. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point.
You can go ahead and believe that all you want, that's part of freedom of expression, no one is stopping you. But don't pretend that you believe in freedom of expression because what you are advocating is censorship of expression that offends you.
It is easy to tweak lyrics for parody, the hard part is finding a good song to base it on.
Your attitude is the root of fascism. -- If people are not competent to take care of themselves, the state must do it.
At least you are consistent in your beliefs, just don't start pretending you put any value on personal freedom.
Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise
Playing music in school, gonna be a big man some day
You got music on myspace
You big disgrace
Kickin your ipod all over the place
We will, we will, sue you
We will, we will, sue you
Buddy you're a young man, pirate man
Shoutin' in the school gonna take on the MAFIAA some day
You got music on myspace
You big disgrace
Wavin' your napster all over the place
We will, we will, sue you
We will, we will, sue you
Buddy you're an old man, poor man
Pleadin' with our lawyers gonna make you pay today
You lost your court case
You big disgrace
The MAFIAA kicked you off of myspace
We will, we will, sue you
We will, we will, sue you
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, get certificates.
Go to college and get an internship that will give you lots of hands-on experience. If you want to do networks, expect that as an intern you will start out doing the drudge work of pulling cables and filling in punchdown blocks. But you should also expect (and this should guide you in selecting which company to do your internship with) to eventually get to the point where you are configuring and troubleshooting the routers too. Learn to write (and debug) network applications on unix too, try writing your own ftp client or MUCH better some tool that will be useful in your intern job.
Do like that site in Russia does - keep a lossless copy on the backend and then allow the customer to specify the format and bitrate and then do a transcode on the fly. You can make it simple for non-geeks by providing a short list of typical encodings with short descriptions as to what they are good for, and then charge less for the lower-quality versions (or charge more for the higher-quality, just depends on you look at it). You could even pre-encode a couple of common formats if you worry about cpu utilization on the server.
5.1 is nice - you would have to go with AC3 and DTS (preferrably full-bitrate DTS) to have a chance of any wide-spread interest but it is only nice if mixed by someone who knows what they are doing, otherwise it is just a gimmick.
The current DMCA, AFAIK, makes breaking encryption a questionable prospect, at best. Why should this even be protected? ...why are we legislating that the use of "weak" encryption is okay?
Because the uses of encryption that the DMCA protects can never be "strong" - DRM is all about giving people the decryption keys to decode the content but trying to trick them through elaborate obfuscation into not realizing they have the keys. That kind of scheme can never be cryptographically secure, so to patch that loophole, the MAFIAA got the DMCA passed which makes it illegal instead of impossible. The MAFIAA are a bunch of lawyers, to them the laws of man are just as good, if not more useful than the laws of math and physics.
Except that people do not like confrontation, especially with strangers which, by definition, is who they would be confronting in such cases.
It is impractical to expect any significant number of employees to actually follow through on such plan, regardless of corporate policy.
The people at Poland Springs and Avian would be pretty shocked to hear that. Fact is, there's plenty of business models that not only compete with free but are built around giving stuff away for free, so that argument just doesn't fly.
You hinted at this in the rest of your post, but I feel the need to say it explicitly. The bottled water companies are NOT competing with free. They aren't selling water, depending on the brand they are selling other, less tangible things - the perception of quality, convenience, fashion. The medium is water, but just as no one would say that newspapers are in the business of selling paper neither are the bottled water companies in the business of selling water.
The entertainment companies have this figured out in many ways - they sell the pop-star image of someone like Brittany Spears (not so much HER anymore, but close enough) and music is just one medium. They just haven't been able to take the final step of giving it away - probably because some music is still about the music and not about being the promotional tool of a larger campaign.
$1M per year is like $650K per year after taxes, and then there are significant expenses that usually come with jobs that pay so well. Even if you think you can live on ramen and catchup, you won't if you want to maintain a job with that pay level.
You are confusing a restriction with a rating under specific conditions. XP (and/or NT) was rated to a specific level (probably C2) in a specific configuration. When the DoD certifies a system, they do it only for a specific configuration.
In this case, the configuration was with the network turned off. But just because that was the way it was rated does not mean each site is going to run it that way. Merely having the rating for one specific configuration is often enough to give a site security admin enough CYA to approve the system for use in a different configuration.
Having seen this stuff happen for a while, it is my opinion that the vast majority of government security work is checking off check-boxes without actually engaging the brain to decide if the intent represented by the check-box is really being followed or not.